in this video Dr Jordan Peterson explains what are the results of having a high IQ and how to know if you have a high IQ an IQ is a very good predictor of Health it's a predictor of longevity it's a predictor of resistance to post-traumatic stress disorder it's a predictor of obviously occupational status it's a predictor of educational success that's a predictor of income it's very powerful predictive and here's another way of conceptualizing its effect so imagine that you could choose how you were going to be when you were born this is in North America because it's going to vary by Society at least to some degree you get to be born into a family that's at the 95th percentile for wealth or you get to be born at the 95th percentile for intelligence who's better off at the age of 40. and the answer is the person who picks being born with an IQ in the 95th percentile at Birth it's more powerful predictor of long-term life outcome than familial wealth so and it shows up everywhere like one of the things we did recently was look at disgust sensitivity we're going to talk a little bit about that when we talk about conscientiousness because orderly people seem to be more sensitive to disgust than disorderly people that seems to be why they're orderly but the higher you are in IQ the less discussed sensitive you are now we don't know exactly why that is maybe it's because you know maybe you could make the inference that IQ is is in related in some way to the physiological Integrity of the cortex you know rather than the limbic system which you know is the source of say emotions and motivations um and the the more powerful it is the more inhibitory capacity it has over the more fundamental motivations and emotions you could make that case the problem is is that in intelligent people don't necessarily seem to be any less impulsive so and you can have a pretty vicious personality disorder that's characterized by extremely disorganized behavior and a complete inability to put long-term plans into operation and still have a high IQ so what are the things we really can't figure out it's just a hell of a thing to try to figure out is like the relationship between IQ and industriousness is zero and that just makes no sense to me because most of the brain models are predicated on the idea that your ability to engage in long-term planning is a factor that's associated with intelligence but then industrious people seem to not only engage in long-term planning they seem to do it right so that if they're more industrious they put their plans into operation then the plans actually work but it's not correlated with IQ so that then I can't figure out well obviously the industrious person in some way is able to regulate their own behavior you know they're not procrastinating for example and you'd think that that the ability to not procrastinate would be a cognitive feature but it doesn't seem to be and we have no idea what makes people industrious and we can't figure it out so it's this incredibly potent predictor it's just about as powerful as IQ and we have no idea what it is so so if you you know if you think if you have a smart idea about that and you want to pursue it like feel free because there's a big mystery there that no one's been able to crack and we've been at it for a long time and have had almost no success you know we had people do things like we give them sentences of ends M's and U's sort of randomly distributed and then we'd have them count the U's you know like a whole page of sentences they're not sentences they're just strings of letter count the U's how useless you know you think that someone industrious would do that better it's like they don't that's an IQ test the people who can count the use faster have higher IQs almost everything that you would do that would where it has to do with manipulation of abstractions of any sort even something that basic seems to be fundamentally associated with IQ people with higher IQs have slightly bigger heads if you control for body size they have slightly bigger brains if you control for body size the axons on their neurons are a bit thicker so the the electrical messages seem to travel a little bit more efficiency efficiently they are slightly faster in simple reflex tests so it goes right down to the level of because they're simple reflex light goes on push a button there's not many neurons mediating that response you know chains of neurons there's only a few neurons communicating so that you can do that but even if that relatively simple processing level IQ is associated with speed so there's a physiological component you're less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease if you have a high IQ and maybe that's because your brain is just more robust you know so you could sustain damage say of up to 50 percent of your brain and you wouldn't even show it if you're if you have a sufficiently high IQ whereas if you're you know if you're on the bottom end of the IQ distribution you're much more you seem to be much more susceptible to to physiological damage nutrition is a big predictor of IQ variation so and a lot of that's been hammered out of modern societies you know so 150 years ago people's IQ was pretty tightly associated with their nutritional status but now you know there are very few people in North America who don't have enough to eat even though there's some variation in quality of diet and that's flattened out a lot of the uh cultural variability and intelligence